Terror Rabbis and the Triumph of the Judean Will

A few days ago Amir Oren wrote a persuasive essay arguing that Israeli intelligence’s portrayal of Meir Ettinger, currently under administrative detention and suspected of masterminded several terror attacks, as a threat to the State is vastly overstated. He asserted that this claim was a mask to conceal the State’s unwillingness to address the broader issues of Jewish terror. Israel’s political élite has too much sympathy with the aims of this movement to extirpate it, as would be required of any other democratic state.

I’m very sympathetic to this belief because I know that Israeli intelligence (and Israel itself) either doesn’t want to, or can’t root out this poison within. It’s natural when such terror goes too far, as it has with the two murders by radical ultra-Orthodox Jews, to focus on a single bad apple. Make an example of him, put him away, then pretend you’ve addressed and eliminated the problem: poof, no more Jewish terror–till the next time.

But I have a lingering doubt about one aspect of this theory: settler terrorism is a real threat. A significant segment among the settlers really does wish to overthrow Israel’s so-called secular state and replace it with a Davidic monarchy. They also seek to destroy Haram al-Sharif and replace it with a Third Holy Temple. They would be more than willing to provoke a final Armageddon-like holy war between Judaism and Islam (or Israel and Palestine).

One may argue, as Oren did in Haaretz that whatever the beliefs of these individuals, they are no match for the power of the State. If it wished, it could snuff them out like a match. But I’m not so sure.

Radical Settlers: Turning Outliers into Rulers

In the 1970s and into the 1980s, before the settler movement grew in political power it has today, many Israelis and Diaspora Jews made the mistake of dismissing the views of Meir Kahane. These settlers were viewed as political extremists, outliers, rabble-rousers. They were even banned (i.e. Kach) from serving in the Knesset. They were a few lunatics screaming epithets and possessed of insane religious zeal. As much as possible, liberal Zionists created a separation between the “real” Israel, the “good” Israel, and the crazy zealots shouting from the hilltops of ancient Judea. In those days, you could legitimately compartmentalize Israel in this way.

But the settlers were smart and the liberal Zionists were fools. With the Likud election victory in 1977, the settlers came to power along with the conventional Likudnik factions. They used this power incrementally to encroach both on Palestinian land and Israeli democracy. Within thirty years, they had bested not only the liberal Zionists, but the “liberals” within Likud (like Dan Meridor and Benny Begin) who refused to do their bidding. The Old Guard was gone and replaced with the new Kahanists, who now ran the major ministries.

While old-line Likudists may claim that Menachem Begin or even Bibi Netanyahu are the legitimate heirs of original Revisionist strongman, Zeev Jabotinsky, there is another figure scarcely mentioned as an inheritor of this legacy. Meir Kahane is as much a disciple of Jabotinsky as they are. And for the purposes of today’s Israel, Kahane is a much-more long-lasting, critical figure in the rise of Israeli authoritarianism. Begin is from the past. Netanyahu too within a day or a month of leaving office will be consigned to historical oblivion. But Kahane will live on. If Israel goes the way of theocracy or dictatorship it will be Kahane who inspired and envisioned it.

The current Israeli government, the most brutal, racist and extremist in the nation’s history, is a product of this settler victory.

Meir Ettinger, Settler Terrorist Du Jour

As we come to learn more about Meir Ettinger, it’s critical to understand the milieu which nurtured him. Of course he was shaped in critical ways by the trauma of having his grandfather assassinated on the streets of New York and his uncle and aunt assassinated on the streets of the West Bank. When your flesh and blood is cut down, it tends to turn some into implacable homicidal avengers, which is apparently something like what Ettinger has become.

Earlier, I noted that Ettinger’s father, Mordechai, teaches at the radical settler yeshiva, Ateret Cohanim (which the Times of Israel typically mislabels as “politically aligned with the state”). This is a religious institution which advocates ethnic cleansing of the Temple Mount and restoration of the ancient priesthood and animal sacrifices. In fact, it is training hundreds of Israeli Jews for this priesthood. If it is “politically aligned” with the State then the State has become an outright theocracy.

Ettinger’s aunt, Nitza Kahane (married to one of Meir’s sons), is no shrinking violet herself. When asked about her nephew’s views on Army Radio she defended them vociferously:

“He wants to change the laws of the country to the laws of the Torah; that’s his right. If he persuades enough people, he can do it. The fact that someone wants to change the laws or wants the state to conduct itself differently has never been a cause for arrest in a democratic country.”

No, my dear Mrs. Kahane, this is sedition. You don’t “change” the laws of a secular state to those of the Torah. It’s not an easy, gentle transition from one legal system to another. It would involve a wrenching revolutionary putsch in which democracy would be snuffed out and a religious dictatorship (aka “monarchy”) would replace it. To claim that Ettinger is a reformer or someone seeking to change the system from within is ludicrous. He’s the guy yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater. He’s the guy perfectly prepared to see a few trampled underfoot to achieve his greater objective.

Settler Rabbis Envision Davidic Kingdom Replacing Secular Democracy

Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh

Ettinger’s father, rather fatuously, blames his son’s radicalization on Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh, the chief of the radical Od Yosef Chai Yeshiva in Yitzhar. He complained of the settler religious leader:

“[Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh] drew him into such terrible things. We love our son and of course we wish he would return to the decent path.”

Ginsburgh, like so many of the worst extremists in Israel, is a product of American Jewry. In his teenage years, he turned to various Hassidic sects and eventually became a baal teshuva, a Jewish “convert” to religious Orthodoxy. Though he earned a BA in mathematics and philosophy from the University of Chicago and an MA in mathematics from Yeshiva University, he quickly determined to devote himself solely to religious studies. He made aliyah and, after the 1967 War, was one of the first Jews to settle Jerusalem’s Old City Jewish Quarter. This was the earliest manifestation of the ethnic-cleansing which takes place now in East Jerusalem on a much larger scale.

After the War, Ginsburgh returned to Brooklyn and had his first personal audience with the Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Schneerson. Hebrew Wikipedia portrays him as a follower of Chabad as is another popular extremist settler rabbi, Dov Wolpe. In 1983, he began teaching widely about Kabbalah and other religious subjects. Eventually, this led to his become rosh yeshiva at Od Yosef Chai. If you conceive of such a place as a place of scholarly refuge and intense Talmudic study, you are only partly right. Its dormitories have also been used by students to launch crude Qassam-type rockets at a neighboring Palestinian village. Two teachers at the seminary published Torat HaMelech, a book which advocates the murder of Palestinian babies (because they will undoubtedly grow into adults who will kill Jews).

Ginsburgh endorsed the book wholeheartedly. But it doesn’t stop there. Wikipedia summarizes his views thus:

Ginsburgh advocates the reinstitution of Jewish monarchy in the Land of Israel.…He advocates “Hebrew labor” − the idea that Jews should only employ other Jews — and believes that Gentiles should not be allowed to live in the Land of Israel, unless they become the “righteous of the nations,” accepting Jewish dominion.

Ginsburgh also supports the rebuilding of the Jewish temple, believing that this would facilitate spiritual elevation and hasten redemption. He favors the practice of Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount, the site of the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque.

In his Kabbalah-inspired universe, Jews are part of the divine order. They are above nature. Non-Jews are part of nature. But not just any part of nature, they are animals. That is, they are not human. For this reason, Ginsburgh goes so far as to say that theoretically, if a Jew needed a liver transplant (p. 134) and a non-Jew could provide a matching organ, it would be permissible to seize the latter and take the liver “by force.”

The commandment prohibiting murder does not apply, in this rabbi’s view, when a Jew kills a non-Jew, since God intended this to apply only in the case of human beings and, as we’ve seen above, only Jews are human. In case you non-Jews were wondering, there’s a way for you to become human. You just have to accept the laws of Moses and Jewish sovereignty. Then you too become part of Jewish divinity.

Ginsburgh’s most controversial work, Barch HaGever, was an ode to Baruch Goldstein, who he viewed as a hero for saving Jewish lives.

There is, as I wrote above, a temptation to minimize the significance of these individuals. To say that they’re crackpots, that no one believes them except for a few similarly skewed followers. But such a view is mistaken.

Outliers in Israel have a habit of becoming rulers. While Israel is currently in dire straits, it could always be worse, and probably will be. For that reason, it is critical that Israel arrest not just Ettinger and the few pogromists who burned a baby alive and a historic church; but that there be a campaign to rid Israel root and branch of this fetid stew of homicidal rage that is settlerism. Chabad rabbis like Ginsburgh and Dov Wolpe should be arrested and prosecuted. Groups like Chabad, Lehava and Honenu should be outlawed as terrorist organizations. Their followers should be proscribed as well if they’ve advocated or perpetrated violence. Send these criminals and terrorists to jail or underground, where they belong.

Israel must be a secular democracy. There can be no compromise on this matter. Those who wish to replace a secular state with a monarchy should be labelled traitors, subversives.

All this is pie-in-the-sky of course. Israel has no intention of mounting such a campaign. It will muddle along as the worst of the settlers creep ever closer to their goal of overthrowing the State as we’ve known it. When the time comes, Israeli secular democracy will go not with a bang, but a whimper. Because those at the levers of power would be just as happy (or more) being King or High Priest, as prime minister.

Yuval Diskin and the Tale of Two States: Israel and Judea

Caption: “Seen anything?” (Wolkowski)

On a related subject, Yuval Diskin, former Shin Bet chief, has written an intriguing, though problematic essay (Hebrew) claiming that there are now two Jewish states: the one you know, of course, is Israel. The one you may not know about is Judea. Forget Palestine, it doesn’t exist. Never has, never will. There may be a non-Jewish minority in Judea, but it will either be driven out or become a minority without rights since Judea will not be a democracy. And the leaders of Judea will not be constrained by the limits of western democracies. They will maintain a state by and for Jews. A state led by zealots and messianists, slightly older, more mature versions of Ettinger and the Hilltop Youth. It will be a state based on violence, racism, and terror, says Diskin. There is no question which of the two Jewish states will dominate the other: Judea without a doubt.

Diskin sees the setttler rabbis as key ideological visionaries in birthing this deformity called Judea. The fundamental, and ultimately fatal flaw in this vision is to replace the sanctity of the [Jewish] people with the sanctity of the land. The land becomes the be-all and end-all of Jewish existence. Despite his great love for the land of Israel, Diskin says he harbors an even greater love for the Israeli people. These are human beings, not rocks or hills or rivers. Humans should always trump land.

Despite the great dangers Diskin sees in Islamist terrorism and Iran’s nuclear threat, the worst threat by far is Jewish extremism. How to combat this?

My conclusion is that we must wait until it gets worse in order for it to get better…The people will only begin to see things as they are, to my sorrow, when things become far worse. So we must wait for that time. Only then will we internalize our obligation to save this mighty Zionist enterprise which we call the State of Israel. Something which is growing ever more distant from the vision of the Founding Fathers.

There is much flawed thinking in this analysis, mainly in that it ignores the existence of the Palestinian people as a nation with its own rights. The fundamental flaw in the ideology of such Zionists is that they believe that Israel can exist in isolation from its neighbors and the rest of the Middle East. That it can be what Ehud Barak called, the “villa in the jungle.” We should also never forget that Diskin, when he ran the Shin Bet argued that Palestinian nationalism within Israel should be a crime. This is a view that is unforgivable and fundamentally wrong.

One also shouldn’t discount the possibility that Diskin sees a political future for himself in one of the opposition parties. This could be a sort of election manifesto. If that’s so, then these could be empty words, since no Israeli politician ever operates according to deeply-held principles. Any politician who has them, sheds them if he wishes to get elected and take a share of power.

Nevertheless, Diskin is an important figure as a former security chief. He knows where the bodies are buried. He knows the system from the inside. He knows its weaknesses. It’s one thing for Avrum Burg to renounce Zionism. It’s another matter entirely when Yuval Diskin renounces settlers, settlements and the Greater Land of Israel.

One problem with your thesis is that as of yet no one knows who threw the fire-bomb that killed the father and baby.
Ettinger’s arrest was posturing by the Israeli government and we shall see, hopefully, who is the real perpetrator.
As far as the tragic death of the young girl at the gay-pride parade there are some serious questions concerning the status of the murderer.
If he was just released after 10 years imprisonment for a stabbing why did the police not have any monitoring on him, they certainly have the resources.

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3 years ago

Dieter Heymann

No one knows? How naive can you get? At the very least the perpetrators know and I am certain that they have bragged their evil deed to several friends.

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3 years ago

eitan

Talking about naivety, Dieter, how naive can you be?!
At this point in time they may or may not know who the perpetrators are.
They may not even be Jews as the house was in hostile territory at the end of a dead end street which seems an unlikely place for the perpetrator{s} to endanger themselves into being caught in the act.
When the authorities announce it we will know for sure.

@ eitan: Who’s being naive? The Shabak knew who the perpetrators were as soon as the attack happened. It’s even possible someone in Shabak knew of the attack before it happened. And if they didn’t, it only proves how utterly incompetent they are (or willing co-conspirators)

Oh & they weren’t even Jews!! What disgusting trash. This is beyond the pale. I will not have you piss on our backs & tell us it’s rain. I put you on a short leash. If you write another word here claiming Martians, Palestinians or anyone but settler Jews did this heinous crime I’ll bounce you outa here so fast your head will spin!

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3 years ago

Dieter Heymann

Thanks Richard. The history of such vile deeds which the perpetrators nearly always hold to be patriotic or God-willing or whatever shows that they nearly always brag about their deeds to friends or relatives.
I have long held that Israeli governments have allowed to grow and have often assisted the growth of a dangerous domestic monster, the settlers on the West Bank. They are far more dangerous to Israel than Iran which is exactly why Mr. Netanyahu uses Iran as a smoke screen.
Are you familiar with the history of the so-called “Werkdorp Wieringen” in the Netherlands which existed until about 1943 when it was closed by the Nazi occupiers? On that farm Zionists who wanted to emigrate to Palestine and do farm work on a kibbutz were trained to do such work. I spent two summers as a youngster on that farm. I remember that most of the trainees were either socialists or communists. Most did not hate the Palestinian Arabs but wanted to live peacefully side-by-side with them. Several of them escaped being murdered in concentration camps by crossing the Pyrenees into Spain from where they were shipped to Haifa in late 1944. I know one of them. Why and how did they lose to the extremist settlers? Money? Immigration from Eastern Europe? USA? It is probably worth an analysis.

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2 years ago

William Burns

There is one reason for optimism: If we live in a universe where the New Republic is now running Eli Valley cartoons, we know that anything can change.

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3 years ago

Mitchell Blood

“Chabad rabbis like Ginsburgh and Dov Wolpe should be arrested and prosecuted.

Arrested and prosecuted for what crime(s)?

“Groups like Chabad, Lehava and Honenu should be outlawed as terrorist organizations.”

@Mitchell: what crap from a Jewish terror enabler like you. He endorsed burning churches. Ginsburgh says Israel is only a place for Jews & non Jews should be expelled, & you ask why they should be considered criminals?? Shameful.

“He made aliyah and, after the 1967 War, was one of the first Jews to settle Jerusalem’s Old City Jewish Quarter. This was the earliest manifestation of the ethnic-cleansing which takes place now in East Jerusalem on a much larger scale.”

Uhh… could you also flesh this out a bit as well? Are you saying that any Jewish presence in the Old City is illegal and amounts to ethnic-cleansing?

You say “Israel’s presence in the Jewish Quarter is based on lies & corruption.” but yet you call it the Jewish Quarter which it had been for at least 1,000 years. They just took back there what the Jordanians left of it after destroying a good deal of it.
And BTW the entrance from Jaffa gate to the WWall was a Jewish market before 1948 which can be verified by many means including photographs. It actually looked like an Arab Mea Shearim. Ane the Israeli govenment left it intact in ’48 when it could have threw everyone out and no one would have blinked an eye.
As far as Ginsburg goes he began in the Lithuanian yeshivot and somehow was ‘brainwashed’ into the Chabad BS which proves your thesis in an earlier post than a high IQ has nothing do with intelligence.
It was his father-in-law Segol, an important ‘leumi’ figure who was one of the first to return to the JQ and this I remember quite vividly from the ’73 war when there were no bomb shelters except for a German Hostel right outside Zion gate who would not permit any Jews in. Thus we built the Succah with walls of sandbags for protection.
Bottom line, there has always been a Jewish presence in the Old City it just being interrupted in the 19 year hiatus between 1948-1967.

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3 years ago

eitan

correction:
“”Ane the Israeli govenment left it intact in ’48 when it could have threw everyone out and no one would have blinked an eye.”
should read ’67 not ’48”

@ eitan: Readers should note that eitan concedes he himself is a Jewish Quarter settler.

None of this refutes the fact that Israeli Jews who moved into the Jewish Quarter did so using chicanery, lies & deceit. If they want to live there they should either rent from a Palestinian owner (w/o later squatting & stealing it) or buy it in legitimate purchases.

To those who argue that it’s impossible for Jewish settlers to purchase Palestinian property using legal, proper means–they have only themselves to blame. The State stole Palestine from Palestinians. Why should any Palestinian sell land to a settler given that history? After there is a peace deal of some sort, then the legal situation will return to one in which Jews may live and buy in Palestine and Palestinians live and buy in Israel. But if there is a one state solution, then anyone should be able to live anywhere as long as they buy using proper, legal methods to do so.

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3 years ago

eitan

You are exercising some very strange ‘logic’ here.
At that time{’73’} I was living on Mt. Zion. I have never lived in the JQ in Jerusalem and have not lived in Jerusalem since 1978 nor do I live on any so-called ‘occupied territory” now.
My simple point was that before ’48 the JQ belonged to Jews for at least a millennium and they moved back after the ’67 war.

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3 years ago

Elisabeth

Eitan@
“this I remember quite vividly from the ’73 war when there were no bomb shelters except for a German Hostel right outside Zion gate who would not permit any Jews in. Thus we built the Succah with walls of sandbags for protection.”
Who is the ‘we’ here then?

And the ‘Germans’ did not let in any ‘Jews’. Right.
Could you flesh that out a little bit?

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3 years ago

Elisabeth

Eitan@ You were there as a yeshiva student in 1973 then? You use ‘we’ and ‘remember it so vividly’ after all. And no, that is not enough ‘fleisch’ for me. I looked at the Wikipedia site of the Dormition Abbey, and found a lot about price tag attacks on it, but nothing about shameful Germans, not admitting Jews in peril of their lives in 1973. Maybe you should add this shameful episode to the Wikipedia article, as you are such an eyewitness to this ‘historical’ fact?

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3 years ago

eitan

I came to Israel in 1971 neither a Zionist nor an anti-Zionist and in fact I did not know the diff between right and left in politics because it simply did not interest me. I was in Oct ’71 at a kibbutz near Afula, Ein Dor, which is opposite Mt. Tabor where there are situated two monasteries, an Eastern Orthodox and a Franciscan.I climbed the mountain{I was younger then} and to this day it is probably my favorite place in Israel. An absolutely stunning view for miles on end and the cleanest air available and completely unadulterated by the modern world.
Subsequently I went Jer {April ’72} and wound up at a yeshiva of Americans on Mt. Zion with basically other Americans who were not involved in anything but learning Torah.
We had no bad relations with either of the two monasteries on Mt. Zion and certainly at that time there was no such thing as ‘price tags’ or whatever you may mean.
Concerning the shelter nobody bothered putting it in the news and the media then was not like today so I cannot see why you are so surprised it is not mentioned. Not everything that happens in the world is recorded esp then. I don’t see why you are so bent on debunking things esp after RS wrong conclusion that I live in the JQ. Aside from that even if I had wanted to it was done by lottery and very expensive, beyond my means, and those who were still around since ’48 were allowed to claim their properties.
And lastly and more important I, personally, would never deface any religious edifices and for that matter anything else.
You are not going to get anymore meat than that because it is the simple truth.

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3 years ago

Elisabeth

Eitan@ You just don’t throw accusations like that around without being able or willing to back them up, and I must say you are being remarkably vague about this incident, if it ever happened.

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3 years ago

pea

Thank you so much for indulging me. I’m not at all interested in justifying shenanigans that take place whenever ideologically motivated Jewish groups acquire property in the Muslim Quarter. What I am more curious about is your opinion on the status of the current Jewish Quarter and the Kotel. In 2006, you wrote “There will have to be some flexible solution to this conflict that allows Jewish neighborhoods in the Old City to rest under Israeli control and Arab neighborhoods under Palestinian.” Do you still believe that? And if not, who should control the Jewish Quarter and the Kotel? Thanks for your patience.

@ Pea: Isn’t it interesting that Pea & her hasbara cohort are researching 10 year old blog posts I wrote. Parsing them with a fine tooth comb are you? Also, please eschew the fake politeness (“Thank you so much for indulging me”). It’s a sure-fire indication you’re trying to draw me out so I will say something useful to you & your comrades, which I won’t.

If there is a 1 State solution, which appears likely, then your question is moot. If there is not, there will never be a 2 state solution given Israeli rejectionist politics. Your question is also moot under that circumstance.

But I will indulge your far-fetched notion that an Israeli government may at some time share sovereignty over Jerusalem. In that case, Israeli Jews living in Palestine (which is East Jerusalem, including the Old City & the West Bank, excluding settlement blocs) should accept Palestinian sovereignty. Just as Palestinians living within 67 Israeli borders should accept Israeli sovereignty. But of course given Israeli racism, there are almost no West Bank Palestinians living inside pre 67 Israel.

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3 years ago

pea

You told me to research what you’ve said in the past. So I did and now that makes me part of this mythical Hasbarah Brigade? There’s no parsing. It took me all of 4 minutes to find that post. There are no comrades. I don’t personally know anyone else who reads this blog. We’ve been through this before and it always amazes me how little tolerance you have for opinions that deviate from yours in the slightest. My question isn’t moot in either a 1 or 2 state solution scenario. Isn’t ethnic cleansing a crime against humanity? Would people living in the Jewish Quarter be subject to prosecution as such? Now let’s say they weren’t and such prosecution was limited merely to government officials who encouraged Jews to move back into Jewish Quarter. And let’s say that justice one day prevails and Palestinians get sovereignty over “East Jerusalem, including the Old City…” wouldn’t it be totally acceptable for the Palestinian government to clear out all Jewish residents in the Jewish quarter given that their presence there was as a result of ethnic cleansing? Please try to just answer the question without belittling me or casting aspersions about my motivations. If it makes you feel better, feel free to post my IP address and whatever else you like – anything so that we can get beyond this paranoid notion that you have that I work for – I don’t know – the Shin Bet, the Foreign Ministry or whatever else you imagine. Anything to get back on track and make an attempt at reasonable discourse.

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3 years ago

Pea

In case you think my hypothetical scenario is far fetched, please recall that after WWII, about 3 million Sudeten Germans were expelled from Czechoslovakia.

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3 years ago

Elisabeth

Pea@ Only one party has been successfully indulging in ethic cleansing over the decades and you know which party that is. Playing the victim of ethic cleansing involves hypothetical future imaginations that are tiresome.

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3 years ago

Arie Brand

@ Eitan

About Jews “taking back” the “Jewish Quarter”: owning real estate is generally an individual not a group thing. So here.

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3 years ago

eitan

I am quite aware of real estate concepts. The JQ meaning almost entirely populated by Jews who individually owned property as was such in the Moslem Q where there were a few Jews also living and quite a few yeshivot.
The concept JQ is akin to ghetto as Jews in Arab countries generally did not live in Arab neighborhoods.
Aside from all that the entire area was under the Ottoman empire so it seems the Turks were the banished ones.

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3 years ago

SimoHurtta

Eitan what happened to the Moroccan Quarter (770 year old), its buildings and inhabitants? Did you Israeli Jews pay a single cent for that in compensation. Obviously the inhabitants did not have “legal” Israeli building permits in the Moroccan Quarter. 🙂

It is rather amusing to read theses constant “justifications” that Jews have had there and there a Jewish presence for “ages” which then gives the Jews, who come from other places, the right to take the land and kick the gentiles out. Does Jerusalem really belong to Jews when some of your religion’s followers have lived there during the past couple of thousands of years? Well in New York has been a constant presence of American Indians. Are they morally allowed in the near future to kick out those 1.1 million American Jews living there? These American Indians can by the the way use also that other familiar justification: The great spirit promised the land to them.

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3 years ago

eitan

@Eliazbeth
The ‘we’ were students at a yeshivah on Mt. Zion and the German shelter was part of the German Dormition Abbey/monastery .
Enough ‘fleisch’ for you?

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3 years ago

pea

@Elisabeth wrote:
“Only one party has been successfully indulging in ethic cleansing over the decades and you know which party that is.”

That’s a bit inaccurate Elisabeth, isn’t it? In a demonstration of intent that reverberates to this very day, total and complete ethnic cleansing of all Jews in areas captured by Arabs took place in 1948. The fate of the Jews in the Jewish Quarter is but one example. Others include Beit Ha’arava in the shore of the Dead Sea, Atarot and Neve Ya’akov in the north of Jerusalem, Kfar Darom, Yad Mordechai and Nitzanim which were in the path of the invading Egyptian Army, and the 4 Etzion settlements. Wherever an Arab Army Concord a Jewish settlement, this settlement ceased to exist. Arab ethnic cleansing was complete, not one Jewish settlement remained in Arab controlled areas in the aftermath of 1948.

I’m not “Playing the victim of ethic cleansing” at all. I had a very real legal question! If the Jewish presence in the Jewish Quarter is the result of ethnic cleansing then it would be completely acceptable to expel the beneficiaries of such cleansing, no?

I think you can easily understand what I mean: Israeli’s have had the upper hand practically from the start and have used that power to drive out the Palestinians, again an again. I am sick of all these ‘intentions’ being brought up as in ‘they want to drive us into the sea, so now we have the right to do this or that’. The only people who actually were driven into the sea were Palestinians at Jaffa Harbor in 1948.

I even came across these ‘intentions’ as justification for the rape of Palestinian women in Lydda, because ‘that is what they would have done to us, had they won the war’.

@ pea: That might be because the Arabs watched Ben Gurion’s ethnic cleansing of 1-million Palestinians living inside Israel. The number of Jews displaced was in the thousands, perhaps 10,000. No comparison.

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3 years ago

pea

@elisabeth @RS – It seems to me that you’re giving the Arabs a pass simply because their ethnic cleansing wasn’t as successful as that of the Jews. But never mind that. I asked one simple question. I will repeat it again for the sake of clarity. In a scenario where Palestinians gain sovereignty over territories beyond the green line, would a mass expulsion of all Jews residing in the Jewish quarter be justified given your contention that their presence there came as a result of ethnic cleansing, a crime against humanity. It’s a very simple question.

@ pea: Not at all. If Arabs had expelled 1 million Jews from Israel I would be equally disgusted with them as I am with Nakba. But they didn’t.

If you are an incompetent pediatrician and kill 1 baby and another bad pediatrician kills 1,000 babies, I’m going to want justice for all those babies who died. But I’m going to be a damn site more concerned to ensure the doctor who killed more gets addressed first.

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3 years ago

pea

[Comment deleted: comments may not repeat themselves ad nauseam.]

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3 years ago

Eilati

Richard – You call R.Eliyahu a racist based on his call to not sell homes to Arabs yet you have no issue with Arabs not selling to Jews.

As for the Jewish Quarter – many Arabs stayed in Israel after 1948. ZERO Jews were allowed to stay in the West Bank and Gaza, not to mention the exodus from all Arab countries.
According to Wikipedia – “The Jordanian commander is reported to have told his superiors: “For the first time in 1,000 years not a single Jew remains in the Jewish Quarter. Not a single building remains intact. This makes the Jews’ return here impossible.”
In addition, it seems no civilians got ownership over the houses and many of the people who lived there were moved to Shuafat. (Wikipedia) – So, there are no Palestinian owners to pay to. It belonged to jews, was managed by Jordanians and the Red Cross for 19 years and came back to the Jews.

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3 years ago

Elisabeth

“You call R.Eliyahu a racist based on his call to not sell homes to Arabs yet you have no issue with Arabs not selling to Jews.”
Are you intentionally stupid? Have you never hear of the concept of ‘context’?
Can you understand that Dutch people, for instance, condemned selling property to Germans during WW2, while now they have no problem with it?

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3 years ago

Eilati

And did it accrue to you that R. eliyahu said it for the exact same reason?

Let me guess – that’s a stupid idea

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3 years ago

Elisabeth

It is stupid, yes, because you apparently do not see the difference in the context.

@ Eilati: I call Eliyahu racist because he calls for Jewish business owners to refuse to employ “Arabs,” rails against Jews who marry Muslims, rants vitriol against non-Jews. Arabs have no obligation to sell their property to Jews. But if there is ever a peace agreement (which there won’t be if Eliyahu has anything to say about it), then normal commerce would ensue with property being sold by both communities to the other as long as their is no chicanery of the sort settlers routinely engage in.

Claiming there are no Palestinian owners of Palestinian property is a disgusting, stupid, immoral lie. I’m about to ban you simply because I find your views racist and offensive. You are hereby warned.

Former Shin Bet head Avi Dichter keeps a sense of proportion. The “Jewish Underground” of the 1980s involved people with “impressive military records” and “access to weapons and explosives,” who planned terror attacks strategically. “What we are seeing now is a disorganized group of young people… [who] lack a coherent guideline, apart from following some madman…. These aren’t the same people, they lack the same tools, and they are being watched by Shin Bet…. What we’re talking about now is people who have very bad intentions. I’m happy to say they also have very meager means.”

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3 years ago

Arie Brand

It should have been pretty clear that Richard was not talking about the State being taken over by armed revolution but by political means – Dichter’s assessment only refers to the first possibility.

Avi Dichter is a right wing jackass white- washing the Shin Bet ‘ s failures, which Diskin refuses to do. Dichter also has the sheer chutzpah to talk about Jewish murderers as if they were legitimate freedom fighters with strategic objectives. Again shameful.

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3 years ago

Laguerre

It sounds as though many Israelis are well on the way to becoming successors of the Zealots. You wouldn’t have thought, 2000 years later, that the same mentality would re-emerge, but it has.

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3 years ago

Arie Brand

@ Eitan
I understood you to be arguing that, since in the past Jews had been living in this quarter, a more recent generation of Jews that might have been coming from all over the world was entitled to force present Palestinian owners out of their houses. If you were not arguing that what did you mean by saying that as far as this quarter was concerned Jews were just taking back what was their own? That is why I made the point that the real estate there is/was individually, not collectively owned.

The settlers are an infinitely greater danger for the state of Israel than Iran which is why PM Netanyahu keeps yelling “Iran, Iran, Iran” to pretend that there is no settler danger. People who firebomb a defenseless home will stop at nothing.

It is a part of a democracy that if the majority wills to change it into another system such as an absolute monarchy , constitutional monarchy, theocracy or whatever other system it can do so as long as it uses legal means. For example if a person or a party would promote an idea that United States should adopt a constitutional amendment to appoint Obama as a president for life with royal powers, to abolish the separation of powers etc. this wouldn’t be an act of sedition. Likewise what Meir aunt Nitza Kahane is saying is presumes his innocence in the crimes he is accused of and if indeed he is innocent of those your accusation of sedition is a defamation if you mean it in a technical sense as a violation of a law against sedition.

@Ariel: This is absolutely false. We have a Constitution. We are a republic & a democracy. This isn’t something up for debate. Democracy isn’t like a hairstyle or fashion. It’s permanent & immutable. People have died to defend it. Anyone who wishes to overthrow this system & replace it with a monarchy or religious state would be guilty of treason & sedition.

We had a Civil War for precisely this reason. The rebels & secessionists lost. Israel has not yet had such a conflict. But it could come to that.

You are a seditionist who supports Jewish terror. You disgust me.

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3 years ago

Arie Brand

@Ariel

Changing a democracy by majority vote into a system that presupposes quite a different basis for the legitimacy of decisions (eg a theocracy, absolute monarchy etc) amounts to sawing off the branch on which one is sitting. From the perspective of the system changed to (the system that presupposes quite a different basis for the legitimacy of decisions) the decision that led to it can only be considered as lacking in legitimacy. There goes your branch.

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3 years ago

Arie Brand

Well, Wikipedia wasn’t particularly helpful for your case. I learned that in the Ottoman era most Jewish houses there were leased from Muslim owners. I also learned this:

“Beginning in the years immediately after 1967, around 6,000 Arabs were evicted from the Jewish Quarter, and the start of exclusion of Palestinians from appropriated land by the private company in charge of its development, for the reason that they were not Jewish. This later became legal precedent in 1978 when the Supreme Court made a decision in the case of Mohammed Burqan, in which the Court ruled that, while Burqan did own his home, he could not return because the area had “special historical significance” to the Jewish people.”

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3 years ago

Arie Brand

My last post was meant as a response to that of Eilati but, indirectly, also those of Eitan.

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3 years ago

Arie Brand

I feel that in our comments we haven’t come to grips with the very serious message in Richard’s post. We might dismiss religious crazies like Ginsburgh too lightly. They seem to come nearer and nearer to the real centres of power (and that also means nearer to the control of Israel’s atomic arsenal). Ginsburgh et al’s obvious contempt for any human life except that of their blinkered co-religionists is extremely alarrming in this context.

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